As Computer Weekly highlighted, large industries have strict policies on data protection, along with where the data is stored. Particularly for a major global arms giant such as BAE, a company that sells weaponry and defence solutions with a variety of governments around the world, putting even innocuous data in the cloud can reveal business and industry secrets.

Talking about data security and the location of that data, Newhouse said:

"A number of high profile outages that users have suffered recently demonstrated just how little control you actually have. When it all goes horribly wrong, you just sit there and hope it is going to get better.

I was on a study tour recently, and 85 percent of European companies out on that, now cite international regulations being their major issue. Everyone was 'on about' the U.S. Patriot Act, saying that the geo-location of that data and who has access to that data is the number one killer for adopting to the public cloud at the moment.

We had these wonderful conversations with Microsoft where we were going to adopt Office 365 for some of our 'unrestricted' stuff, and it was all going to be brilliant. I went back and spoke to the lawyers and said, "It's Ireland" [the datacenter], and should that fail, then it will go to Holland. And the lawyers asked what happened if they lose Holland?"